Lesson: Tanabata: Japan's Star Festival
Grade Level: ElementarySubject Area: English and Language Arts,Visual & Performing Arts
Bring Japan's Star Festival, Tanabata, to the classroom and experience a Japanese summer holiday through visual aids, storytelling and many hands-on activities!
Lesson: Nature and the Environment in Postwar Japan
Grade Level: SecondarySubject Area: English and Language Arts,Social Studies
Modern Japan has a particularly fascinating relationship with the environment. Students will explore Japan's seemingly contradictory attitude and actions, characterized both by a profound, self-proclaimed respect for nature along with a proclivity to exploit and degrade the natural environment. Students will use a variety of sources including informational texts, poetry, and traditional and modern art to explore this paradox. They also will evaluate the government's response and the social reprecussions.
Lesson: Our Family and Other Families: Using Totoro to Teach Family Structure
Grade Level: ElementarySubject Area: English and Language Arts,Social Studies
In this lesson for elementary students, children find similarities between their own families and Japanese families using the well-known and well-loved film "My Neighbor Totoro."
Lesson: The Bubble Economy and the Lost Decade
Grade Level: Secondary,Post-SecondarySubject Area: English and Language Arts,Social Studies
This lesson uses well-know editorials, speeches, and poems to explore the Japanese reaction to the Bubble Economy and Lost Decade.
Lesson: Changing Times, Changing Styles: New Japanese Literary Styles of the Late 19th Century
Grade Level: SecondarySubject Area: English and Language Arts
Kunikida Doppo’s story, "Unforgettable People," provides an example of a style of Japanese literature that developed in the 1880s and 90s as a result of encounters with European literature and other changes in the Japanese lifestyle related to the Meiji Restoration. The author(s) of this lesson suggest ways in which a discussion of the impact of this type of cultural contact may be introduced into the classroom.
Lesson: Akutagawa Ryunosuke and the Taisho Modernists
Grade Level: SecondarySubject Area: English and Language Arts
The modernist literary movement is commonly characterized by experimental styles and themes. Literature produced in Japan during the Taisho Period shares many characteristics with this global movement, as students will discover by analyzing literature from this period such as Akutagawa Ryûnosuke’s short story "In a Grove," (1922) as well as Kurosawa's film Rashômon (1950), a later film based on Akutagawa’s works.
Lesson: Individual and Society: Natsume Sôseki and the Literature of the Early 20th Century
Grade Level: SecondarySubject Area: English and Language Arts
The place of the individual in society is a significant issue in understanding Meiji Period Japan. In reading and discussing the novel Sanshirô by Natsume Sôseki, students will consider the ways in which Japanese writers of the period reflected larger societal trends, and, more generally, how individuals react to societal change.
Lesson: National Identity and Literature from Okinawa
Grade Level: SecondarySubject Area: English and Language Arts
Through examples of Okinawan literature and its relationship to the larger genre of “Japanese literature,” the author(s) of this lesson addresses problems in the definition of ethnic and national identities.
Lesson: The “I” Novels in the Context of Early 20th-Century Japan
Grade Level: SecondarySubject Area: English and Language Arts
Focusing on developing students’ understanding of how a writer's background affects the way he or she writes about personal experience, this lesson utilizes the literary works of Shiga Naoya and Hayashi Fumiko to show how “I novels” provide insight into both the authors’ backgrounds as well as their reflections on problems of human existence and social life.
Education Programs are made possible by generous funding from The Freeman Foundation.
Generous support for Education Programs is provided by Continental Airlines.
Additional support is provided by The Norinchukin Foundation, Inc., Chris A. Wachenheim, Joshua N. Solomon, Jon T. Hutcheson, Lesley Nan Haberman, Joshua S. Levine and Nozomi Terao.
Student and Family Programs are supported by the New York City
Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
